This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 3:25 pm by Dawn and is filed under On-demand learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Over at Weblogg-ed, Will Richardson looks at the differences he’s noticed between reading online and reading on paper. This section especially jumped out at me:
… For some reason, probably because I was a former English teacher, I reflect on this whole reading is changing discussion a lot. Probably 75% of what I read I read online. The other 25% is almost all books. I read all of my news from papers, magazines, etc. online, all of my correspondence, all of the blogs that I follow. And, as I’ve written before, my reading habits have changed a great deal. It has become an effort for me to work with longer texts, to do sustained reading and thinking, to stick with complex narratives. …
I hear that. Reading a book all the way through, unless it’s a novel, has become a less and less frequent event in my life. I used to pore more carefully through more and longer articles in magazines and newspapers, but that’s become less routine, as well.
Richardson, and the people he links to in the posts above (and please do click through), suggest that it’s the nature of reading on a screen and using the Internet. I wonder whether that’s causation or correlation, or, how much of it is the medium itself and how much of it is the environment and climate of expectation surrounding use of the Internet.
Just a little before the Internet really took over the life of everyone with broadband access, I remember a Dilbert comic strip included in one of Scott Adams’ books where the concept of the PowerPoint executive summary was mercilessly mocked. There were three bullet points on the fictional summary slide, with the last bullet being the unforgettable, “I like Jell-O,” and the clueless executive being lampooned following up with a request to make the presentation simpler.
Previously, you had to be a senior executive or high level politician to be able to access Internet-style levels of information. Which is to say, broad information on many subjects, well summarized for maximum uptake, evaluated in parallel with a constant stream of interruptions from many different individuals. Certain jobs simply used to require it, though for many individuals now, just interacting with their friends requires it.
You used to need the equivalent of a herd of executive assistants and middle managers, or a congressional policy staff, in order to be deluged with as much information and personal communication as anyone with a good Internet connection has access to today. The people formerly subjected to that could sometimes stand out as being both well-informed (also extremely busy, as everyone is these days) and also sometimes surprisingly clueless and disconnected from the basic facts of their decisions. That’s why Dilbert’s iconic Pointy-Haired Boss was such a resonant and powerful archetype - it captured something essential about people asked to make decisions about things that they’d learned about as if by a game of Telephone.
We’re all becoming the Pointy-Haired Boss. How to deal with that?
Some people can manage to still learn deeply in an environment like that, but it’s more time-consuming, from end to end. In the disconnected way of studying a topic that occurs in an information and communication-saturated environment, it can take more time to form a comprehensive and coherent narrative of events than in slow, continuous study, and it seems to me that it takes far more deliberative effort.
Compensating requires thinking about how we think, forming one’s own narrative threads onto which events can be strung in proper relation to each other. It does require intentionally slowed down learning and study time with longer texts in order to create the habits of mind that allow a person to generate useful relationships between data points where none have been supplied. And maybe as a mechanical issue, it requires something a little easier on the eyes and (depending on your data device) posture than a digital screen.
It was an information revolution when people stopped having to preserve all their knowledge in oral traditions. Someone who was properly trained could remember a lot that way, but very few people had the skill. The transition to written knowledge must have alarming to some, as was Gutenberg’s spreading of the written word to ever greater audiences who’d only ever had access to as much information as they could personally remember. The societal upheavals, including the Protestant Reformation, that followed the introduction of the printing press are subjects of endless fascination for people interested in studying the intersection of information and social change. It took a very long time for everyone to wrap their minds around the uses of the new technology, which ended up changing the face of the world irrevocably over several generations.
At the start of the paper-to-digital information revolution, and we’re not even a full human lifetime into it, it seems that the information glut is pushing people into information gluttony. People can know far more than they may be able to understand well, but nonetheless, we feel we have to know it.
I don’t think everyone’s adapting well. I don’t always feel that I’m adapting well. I skim too much these days; it’s become habitual even when I’m reading dead tree media and friends of mine who spend a lot of time online often report similar impressions. Do I know more? I certainly hope that the answer is yes, if only by the sheer fact of gathering more information continuously over time. Is what I know from Internet reading as useful to me as other reading? I can’t objectively answer that question.
Yet I don’t know if pushing the blame for these concerns onto the medium captures the root of the problem and I don’t think it will help us adapt better. The Internet is a powerful enabler of Pointy-Haired Boss brain, but those are our hands holding the mice.
One Response to “No cream, thanks, just skimming”
Leave a Reply
October 15th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Interesting post! Like Will, most of my reading is online, but I still like books, and am currently reading Presentation Zen. What jumped out at me from this book is that it is not Powerpoint that is bad, but bad use of Powerpoint by most presenters. The same could be said of many applications - it is not the Pointy-Haired Bosses enabling these, but rather as you note, the ones holding the mice.